Back To The 1980s? Inside Europe's Biggest Football Hooliganism Forum

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Smoke raises from the stand of Ajax fans after flares are thrown during a Group E Champions League soccer match between AEK Athens and Ajax at the Olympic Stadium in Athens, Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2018. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)ASSOCIATED PRESS

This week has seen football hooliganism thrust forcibly back into the sports narrative, with the biggest game of the weekend - the Copa Libertadores Final between Argentinian giants Boca Juniors and River Plate - postponed because of fan violence. Last night, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at supporters of Ajax Amsterdam by a fan of AEK Athens before their Champions League clash. For fans in Europe, the Copa Libertadores Final violence seemed like a throwback. The incident in Athens showed that it is an aspect of the game that has never really gone away.

The vast majority of the millions who sat down to watch the match on Saturday night did so because of the fan culture associated with both sides of the Superclasico derby rather than out of any great love for Argentine football. The two eternal rivals, meeting in South America’s biggest game, was sure to bring fireworks and it did, but of all the wrong kind.

In truth, the line between what we wanted to see - unabashed passion, visceral hatred, intense rivalry - and what we got, in terms of violence sufficient to force the cancellation of the match, is very thin. In Argentina, where away supporters are banned and where almost 100 people have been killed in football violence since 2008, the potential for catastrophe is well known and Saturday’s incident, in which Boca’s team bus was bombarded with missiles and their players injured by a combination of flying glass and tear gas, would barely register on the nation’s Richter scale of football hooliganism.

The European response tended to hold that it was a shame that nobody got to see the game, and another setback for Argentinian and South American football. Various outlets traded on the idea that this exoticized football, beamed in from sunny foreign climes, was a throwback to the good old bad old days, with the implication that the passion on the terraces and the violence associated with it were two sides of the same coin, which Europe has largely left behind.

A slow embourgeoisement of the sport has largely ushered the uglier side of football away from the mainstream, certainly in Western Europe. Yet it doesn’t take much poking around to find it anew. In countries that are peripheral to European football’s Big 5 Leagues of England, Italy, Spain, France and Germany. Greece’s cup final in May was the scene of huge rioting, Turkey’s cup semi-final was abandoned after a coach with hospitalized by a fan attack and derbies from Sofia to Belgrade to Warsaw are regularly stopped while supporters battle in the stands or with the police.

Western Europe is not immune. In 2017, Lyon fans fought pitched battles on the field with Besiktas fans in a UEFA Europa League tie, while clashes between English and Russian fans before their Euro 2016 match led to international news. So what can be done about this? Are the media in Europe simply pretending that these incidents don’t happen?

Security forces stand guard outside outside Antonio Vespucio Liberti stadium where River Plate soccer fans gather before the announcement that their team's final Copa Libertadores match against rival Boca Juniors is suspended for a second day in a row in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sunday, Nov. 25, 2018. In one of the most embarrassing weekends in South American football history, the Copa Libertadores final was once more postponed on Sunday. The same decision was made on Saturday after Boca's bus was attacked by River fans. (AP Photo/Diego Martinez)ASSOCIATED PRES

Certainly, there is always first-hand evidence that football violence has not gone away. One need only briefly glance at Ultras-Tifo, one of the largest football hooligan websites, to see a running update of who is fighting who and where. With almost a million likes on Facebook, they post videos and photos of the better aspects of football fan culture - choreographies on the stands, for example - but also the darker side. The Molotov attack in Athen was not news to anyone who reads Ultras-Tifo - they had ten pages of comments on a similar incident between the two fans the night before, so anyone reading it could have foreseen the trouble at the game.

In a notoriously subcultural field - “For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible” is a regular hooligan mantra - the language used on Ultras-Tifo is opaque.

This is a forum orientated around a fundamentally illegal activity and on which ten-second blurry videos are the proof of achievement, so words are often minced and actions heavily implied. Photos are posted with banners from matches as proof of famous victories, trophies taken and foes vanquished, but with little explanation. The rules of the game are debated ad infinitum: are weapons allowed? Who is a legitimate hooligan and who is a “scarfer”, a non-hooligan fan? Does wearing a Stone Island jacket, a brand popular with hooligans, make one a hooligan? What constitutes a victory in a fight, and does it even matter? Is just showing up and not running away a victory in itself?

As the majority of users are commenting in their second or third languages, while also attempting to use slang that they have parsed from English working class culture (as a result of movies such as The Football Factory and Green Street), comments have to be pieced together. One needs an in-depth understanding of European history, as beefs between nations are constantly brought up: a solid knowledge of the Treaty of Trianon (1918), the Yugoslav Wars and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire are required and, of course, the myriad neo-Nazi and Antifa teams are in constant battle. Racism, sexism and homophobia are the rule rather than the exception.

Gaining “respect” and having the correct “mentality” are paramount and unwritten rules are everything, so navigating any discussion can become bewildering. But the discussion is clearly taking place. This is no online-only message board either: there are videos and photos to prove that this subculture is still very real in the streets.

It may seem trivial, but come every European week, the forum is alive with planned meetings, reports of fights and videos from traveling supporters crisscrossing the continent. It is there if only one seeks it out. That nobody does, and that it barely gets mentioned, is collective unknowing on behalf of the mainstream media, conscious that football hooliganism is bad news in a game that sells papers better than anything else. When it does rear its way into the media, it is also cast as a “relic” of the “dark days”, out of touch with modern football. The problem is invisible until, like in Marseille in 2016, it isn’t. Anyone who casually looked at Ultras-Tifo could have told you well in advance what was going to happen when the Russians met the English at Euro 2016.

It is true that, by and large, major hooligan incidents are a thing of the past in European football. The dark days were the 1980s, when 36 people were killed as a results of hooliganism at the 1985 European Cup Final, 96 were killed in a crush at Hillsborough and 56 people killed in the Bradford stadium fire. Thereafter, most major European leagues instigated minimum standards for stadia to replace crumbling terraces and, more crucially, made conscious efforts to remove hooligans from the grounds.

Arguably, the most effective way of doing this has been economic. The social group that provided the majority of supporters for the entire history of the sport has been working-class men, and one does not need a degree in sociology to know that this demographic has been at the root of most major social disturbances in history. When the Premier League and the Champions League were founded in 1992, they instigated a break between the clubs and their traditional supporters that has, year on year, seen ticket prices rise and the traditional owners of the game, the industrial working class, priced out.

One of the consequences of this break has been making the clubs financially independent of their fans. Matchday revenue - that is, the amount of money provided to the clubs by their supporters buying tickets and spending money in the stadium - is regularly less than a quarter of the income of large clubs. A Champions League team receives in excessive of €30m by qualifying for the Group Stage, on top of the lucrative TV money that they receive from their domestic leagues, essentially rendering the financial contributions of their fans unimportant. 10 Premier League clubs would have still made a profit last season had nobody attended their games.

Outside of the Big 5 leagues, however, the fans are still very much necessary. These are the countries where the hooligans still wield the most power: clubs need them, because if they stopped going to the games, then the stadium would be empty. The irony being, of course, that it is because of the hooligans that many regular fans stopped going to the stadium. Dinamo Zagreb are a good example of this. Their Maksimir stadium is the largest in Croatia, with a capacity of 35,000, but their average attendance is a shade over 4,000. Their hooligans, the Bad Blue Boys, occupy three tiers of one stand behind a goal, but the rest of the ground is empty. Their dedication has driven everyone else away.

The average fan might not have anything to do with hooliganism, but their matchday experience is defined by it: from buying a ticket to getting to the stadium to what happens when they are inside.

In Turkey, for example, one cannot simply buy a ticket: one must first attain a “passolig” card, essentially a credit card onto which a ticket is loaded. (Incidentally, this was sold to the public as an ID card for fans, intended to limit hooliganism but is considered by fans to be a naked marketing ploy designed to rinse fans for more cash). This makes buying tickets incredibly hard, especially for casual supporters who do not attend every game, and lead to empty stadiums. Italy also operates a similar system. Incidences of football violence have not notably declined in either country.

When fans go to the stadium, they are corralled by police in riot gear, herded into the stadium and body-searched. Police treat football matches as a riot waiting to happen and often seem as if they want one to occur, if only to break up the boredom - in Germany, they get paid more when they are forced to wear their riot helmets, which many fans feel makes them prone to starting and exacerbating trouble rather than stopping it. The situation that created the Hillsborough disaster - that is, a total breakdown in trust between the police and football supporters - is recreated again afresh. The old adage that treating people like animals makes them act like animals is played out everywhere.

Across Europe, football as a spectator event is dying, and when the game is reduced to a televisual experience, what is to stop fans in smaller nations simply turning over to watch the Premier League or Serie A? It would be understandable for fans in Croatia to watch Barcelona and Real Madrid, who have leading Croatian players among their other stars, rather than the lower quality of their domestic league.

The obvious question is, of course, what can be done about this? The presence of hooligans makes the police treat everyone like hooligans, while the police presence is required to keep the few hooligans that there are apart. For many of those involved with violence, their club and their group are the only things that they have to hold on to, especially in countries with failing economies and decreased opportunities for young men. Ideas of bruised masculinity and masculine alienation filter heavily into this argument as well. It is rare that young, successful men with jobs and families go out of their way to start fights on the weekend at football matches.

For many of this demographic, their only interaction with the state is with the cops that hem them in at football stadiums on a Saturday. For the state, it must seem easier if football didn’t exist at all. When Liverpool lost to Red Star Belgrade on the last matchday of the Champions League, few reports of the match failed to mention the amazing atmosphere created by the Delije, the hardcore fans. Other reports of their activities, and of countless other groups from Europe’s forgotten football teams, are available on Ultras-Tifo and other websites, should anyone want to read them. They might not be as uplifting.

I have been a sports journalist since I was 15 and a sports fanatic since long before that. My first paid job was writing Rugby League match reports and I got paid with a bag of chips. Now, I make a living from taking apart the big stories in football, boxing, cricket and, y...